Since April 1, 2009, Microsoft is making SharePoint Designer 2007 available as a free download.

Customers with SharePoint Designer 2007 Software Assurance (SA) current as of April 1, 2009 received upgrade rights to Expression Web for the lifetime of their SA agreement. 

Microsoft believes that these changes help you enable more users in your organization to create customizations that increase the value of your investments in SharePoint products and technologies now and in the future.  Microsoft is making SharePoint Designer even better in its next version, which will ship simultaneously with their next release of SharePoint. While the current version of Expression Web does not directly support SharePoint, Microsoft is also making significant investments to ensure that future versions of Expression Web become an excellent choice for page customization of SharePoint sites. 

You can expect their future investments in this area to be focused on ensuring that each relevant role within your organization has the right tools to work on SharePoint while allowing different roles to collaborate. To this end, Expression Web and the full Expression Suite will empower professional designers with page customization capabilities on SharePoint, while SharePoint users can continue to use SharePoint Designer. Microsoft’s goal is to continue helping customers use SharePoint to deliver custom portal solutions, extranets, intranets, internet-facing sites, collaboration solutions, social networking sites, and internal applications on top of the extensive capabilities of SharePoint.

This is an exciting time for SharePoint and Microsoft is confident that you will be impressed by their continued commitment to providing you with the right tools to support the investments you have made. Your account team or your Microsoft partner are there to assist you and can provide you with any additional information.

For more information
Download SharePoint Designer for free
Letter to SharePoint Designer Customers